I’ve also played a bunch that were apparently created by people who had never written code before, but decided to publish their work anyway. Absolutely horrible stuff. But hey, they’re free… what can you expect? The one issue that’s endemic to all the mods I’ve seen is that the voice acting is absolutely horrifyingly bad. It’s pretty obviously just the creator and his roommates (and one of their girlfriends, maybe) talking into a webcam mic.
The first three listed above are supported by Valve, which is nice. By “supported”, I mean they’re listed on Steam. Unfortunately, most of the mods available are multiplayer, and I have zero interest in being fragged every thirty seconds by a bunch of eighth graders.
I was going to name the all three of those, RNATB. I haven’t been able to come across a quality single-player mod since Minerva myself and would love to find one of its caliber: superb production values with a relevant fanfic narrative in the HL universe = absolute brilliance. I would assume you’re already aware of Black Mesa, which is second only to Duke Nukem Forever as far as development time is concerned. They’ve been working on that mod since time began. Or since HL2 came out in 2004, so, nearly five years now. I’m glad they’re taking their time, but at the same time I’m certainly not holding my breath because part of me fears it’s destined to be vaporware. (Of course, I’ll probably be one of the first people on here to chime in when it comes out …)
If you’re at all interested in architecture, there’s an interesting map of Fallingwater, Frank Lloyd Wright’s crowning masterpiece, which gets me wondering how cool it would be to mount a last stand defense there against a swarm of zombies coming in from the surrounding woods!
The trailer for Black mesa source promises its release for this year.
There’s a mod called Half-Life 2 - FakeFactory Cinematic mod that upgrades the graphics of Half-life 2 to high def. It’s almost 3 gigs in size and gives Alyx huge boobs.
Really? I did not know that. I had downloaded the game from Steam, but I didn’t realize you needed Steam if you had bought the game at a brick and mortar store…
Nor did I until I got the stupid DVD home and realized that there was nothing else on it except for the Steam installer and the game license.
Why the hell would you put the game on a DVD-ROM when it’s ~60 megs?
ETA: To install an HL2 mod you just extract the folder to Steam\SteamApps\SourceMods, and when you run Steam it’ll be listed among your downloaded games. Most of them only require that HL2 be installed… one or two require Episodes 1 or 2 instead because they use more pre-existing textures/sounds, etc.
You could try SMOD. It’s basically hl2 on crack. The enemies are harder, you get about 30 weapons (including the strider blaster, banana bombs, and kicking), there’s bullet time, and tons of gore. Actually, if you shoot a dead body, it explodes, and you can pick up the remaining pieces for health.
The basic idea is that a teleportation accident not only opens up a rift to a parallel dimension, but mess things up over there as well causing evil things to invade Gordon’s world. Like I said, kind of bizarre especially the depictions of the parallel dimension. Neat to play though.
I think that the thing I didn’t like the most about it is that you had to figure out how to defeat the alien doohickeys. (You can’t just keep shooting at them until they die) It seemed a little random as well with him teleporting all over the place.
